Lithuania: Palanga – Amber Museum
The Baltic Sea is world renown for amber – fossilized tree resins – valued as gemstones all over the world. The museum in Palanga has 28,000 pieces (world third largest collection). What is actually more interesting, 15,000 of these pieces have inclusions in them – prehistoric dinosaur age insects that got stuck in the sap and flowing tree resins hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s just beyond incredible and it’s been over 30 years since I was in this museum before. Bugs, insects, even lizards – all stuck in amber. In fact, the entire premise of the Jurassic Park movie was based on extracting dinosaur DNA from a mosquito stuck in amber. Besides the inclusion amber, the museum has a fairly large collection of amber jewelry and decorations.
